Florence Peake
ARTISTS TO WATCH (a2w)
Each month we invite a member of the She Performs community to share their Artists to Watch - a personal selection of three artists whose work has caught their attention. This month’s a2w have been chosen by Marita Fraser. Published over three consecutive days, the third of Marita’s a2w is Florence Peake …
Apparition Apparition (collaboration with Eve Stainton)
Performance
Photo credit: Riccardo Banfi. Courtesy Delfina Foundation and Arts Council England
FLORENCE PEAKE
Florence Peake is a London-based artist making solo and collaborative performance works intertwined with an extensive visual art practice of painting and sculpture. Peake’s practice uses painting, drawing, clay and movement with bodies. Clay, paint, pen, charcoal, limbs, tongues and the communal, rub alongside in the works, offering the body as a site of destabilised material. Peake's work offers the body as a site of protest, encouraging chaotic relationships between the body and materials and audience. Peake utilises what is left behind in performative works to produce sculptures and drawings. Clay, formed from bodies performing, is hardened and fired. Film stills, and muscle memory forming the basis for figurative drawings.
The works Slug Horizons and Kneading Paradise (2017-2019) were developed in collaboration with Eve Stainton. Slug Horizons is a live work, the peripheries of the body, hands, feet, heads, mouths, touch and move into the other, in a what Peak describes as ‘kneading’, movements in which two combine into a moving body of multiple parts. These bodily encounters of mouths, hands, feet on and within the other, creates folds, crevices, spaces and folding of flesh. The work offers the body as a creative site of making and remaking, not fixed in a singular physicality. Kneading Paradise, invites the audience to use markers to draw out spaces, lines, embellishments onto the performers bodies, the performers drape their bodies in and around the audience prior to performing, drawing, ‘kneading’, onto and into each other. This collaboration with Stainton continued in APPARITION APPARITION, (2019) in which the performance score involves Peake and Stainton drawing onto each other, using these lines and marks as points of connection, and expansion into a remaking of themselves through live performance.
Peake’s recent drawings of oil stick on canvas, draw from a physical understanding of unfixed bodies, offering a representation of what non-normative physicality might look like as a fixed image. Working from video and photographic stills of collaborative performance with Stainton these drawings offer Peake’s muscle memory in a visual form. The work, Pink Blue drawing score, (2019) is far from stable offering moments of contact and connection from physical moments of moving through. Peake’s practice offers the body as a transformative form, challenging notions of singularity and embracing the body as a site of collaboration, transformation, creating space/s for non-normative and unfixed body/ies to materialise.
Pink Blue drawing score (2019)
Oil paint, oil bar on canvas paper
40.64 cm x 50.8 cm
Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist
Marita Fraser is an artist, writer and researcher exhibiting internationally, including exhibitions with Kunsthaus Vienna, Städtisches Museum Engen, Atelierhaus Salzamt Linz, Kunstverein Wilhelmshöhe Ettlingen, MU Eindhoven and Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. In 2016 she was awarded the ArtReview Casa Wabi Residency Award and was resident at Museums Quartier Vienna (Q21). She is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art supported by an AHRC/TECHNE doctoral award.
If you would like to contribute your Artists to Watch, please get in touch: contact@sheperforms.com.
